Shadow of Mordor (and the sequel) had something called the "Nemesis" system where some of the Orc Captains you kill (and the ones who kill you) might survive off screen and get stronger and come back with scars and buffs and new nicknames. It didn't do the village/town stuff you are talking about. They talked about doing it in future games but never did.
Didn't find any good technical write-ups. Although apparently it's "patented".
Here's a decent video overview. I hate that everything is video now but this is the world we live in I suppose.
Same thing with learning Japanese. Just memorize the symbols. It's phonetic. Of course there are complex meanings and subtleties but that's just how we all play with language. As a foreigner your pronunciation can be good once you get the basics. But you have to match the sounds with the letters. We all did it once. We can do it again.
Related, I spent several formative years in Taiwan. Back then, my Taiwanese phone (way before smartphones) used bopomofo as the primary input method for typing Chinese, so I had to learn it.
Unfortunately, some of the 注音 symbols are remarkably similar to Japanese kana, and I found that my familiarity with hiragana and katakana actually caused me constant grief, as I kept mixing up the pronunciations.
Almost nothing aside from children’s books is written exclusively in hiragana or katakana. You have to also memorize the variable readings of about 2000 kanji and many texts are nearly unintelligible without them. Pretty much everyone can memorize the former, but must struggle with the latter.
Both Korean and Mandarin are simpler in this regard (and the latter follows the same grammatical order as English).
When I was in Japan all the street signs and train stations had a little transliteration in hiragana of the kanji name. Super useful to be able to read it
"Remembering the Kanji," by James Heisig, will set you up real good. I recommend this to anyone who starts in with the 3000+ character thing. It is fundamentally different from rote memorization that they would have you do at school, instead using mnemonics and stories.
Hanzi as used in Chinese usually have exactly one reading. On the other hand, virtually all kanji in Japanese have several different pronunciations depending on context.
> What do you mean Mandarin is simpler in this regard?
Just to add context to a sibling comment, Japan's first "writing system" was literally just Chinese.
I don't mean Chinese characters, I mean that if you wanted to write something down, you had to communicate in written Chinese. Over time this written Chinese accumulated more and more transformations bringing it in alignment with spoken Japanese until we get what we see today. However, this means that, to a first approximation, modern Japanese is some amalgamation of Old Chinese and Middle Japanese.
Actually, use of Chinese co-existed alongside the whole transformation process, so we actually see this funky mix of Early and Middle Japanese with Wu, Han, and Song Chinese. Character readings varied by region and time period, and so the the reading of a compound kanji term in Japanese mostly reflects the time period when that word was imported. This is why a single kanji ends up having multiple readings. Later, people began backporting individual characters onto native Japanese words, giving yet another reading.
The character 行 is a particularly illustrative example: 行脚 (an-gya), 行動 (kou-dou), 行事 (gyo-ji). The first reading "an" comes from 7th century Chinsese or so, "kou" comes a bit later from the Han dynasty, and "gyo" even later from Song. Then we have the backports: 行く末 (yu-ku-sue), 行く (i-ku), 行う (okona-u). The first "yu" reading is from Middle Japanese, "i" from Modern Japanese, and "okona" from I have no clue when. That's six different readings for 行 alone!
Oh, and then there are "poetic" readings that are specific to usage in people's names: 弘行 (hiro-yuki) etc. Granted, these are often quite evocative of the above readings or that of synonym characters.
The historical introduction process also explains why older readings tend to be more obscure, 1) they had less time to accumulate usage, and 2) they tend to be specific to Buddhist and administrative themes.
Note: The above is just what I've pieced together osmotically over the years, so I'm sure there are errors.
Admittedly I only know (a little) Japanese and no Korean, but I get the superficial impression that kana are generally much more phonetically faithful than Hangul (namely, because of the post-WWII spelling reform that updated all the kana spellings). Like, the fact that Wiktionary gives "phonetic Hangul" for each Korean entry, to more accurately represent the actual pronunciation, makes me really suspicious of the common internet claim that Hangul is the easiest script to learn.
However, Japanese also has allophony (the moraic nasal and devoicing both come to mind) and kana aren't entirely phonetic (e.g. ha/wa, he/e, ou/ō, ei/ē). I don't know enough about Korean to know if the "irregularities" are also this minor or not—can any Korean speakers/readers enlighten me?
Gorey was a unique artist. Have had his Amphigorey books on the shelf since I was a youthful edgy goth but I will crack them open again tonight. "The Curious Sofa: A Pornographic Work by Ogdred Weary" is a masterpiece of innuendo from 1961 and that article doesn't even mention it in a story that talks about him being gay though? Lazy journalism.
The introduction says:
"For Others"
The first line is:
"Alice was eating grapes in the park, when Herbert, an extremely well-endowed young man, introduced himself to her".
I was going to type in some more but it is well... pornographic in an interesting way. There is not a single bad word or naked picture, just allowing your own brain to fill in the details with the nuances of language.
I'm sure the book mentions it but some editor must have removed it because of the title.
Downvoting for paywall though. I dunno. Ban WP links?
The original post is written by AI so I will read it briefly, but your comment is fascinating. I got through undergrad math by brute force memorization and taking the C. Or sometimes the C-. The underlying concepts were never really clear to me. I did take a good online calculus class later that helped.
However, I have questions:
"Turns out the quantity they needed exists, but couldn't be described in their notation" What is this about? Sounds interesting.
"Statisticians just said "oh, that function" and gave it a new name." What is this?
I never understood there is a relationship between quadratic equations and some kind of underlying mathematic geometric symmetry. Is there a good intro to this? I only memorized how to solve them.
And the existential question. Is there a good way to teach this stuff?
> I never understood there is a relationship between quadratic equations and some kind of underlying mathematic geometric symmetry.
In a polynomial equation, the coefficients can be written as symmetric functions of the roots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vieta%27s_formulas - symmetric means it doesn't matter how you label the roots, because it would not make sense if you could say "r1 is 3, r2 is 7" and get a different set of coefficients compared to "r1 is 7, r2 is 3".
Since the coefficients are symmetric functions of the roots, that means that you can't write the roots as a function of the coefficients - there's no way to break that symmetry. This is where root extraction comes in - it's not a function. A function has to return 1 answer for a given input, but root extraction gives you N answers for the nth root of a given input. So that's how we're able to "choose" roots - consider the expression (r1 - r2) for a quadratic equation. That's not symmetric (the answer depends on which one we label as r1 and which we label as r2), so we can't write that expression as a function of the coefficients. But what about (r1 - r2)^2? That expression IS symmetric - you get the same answer regardless of how you label the roots. If we expand that out we get r1^2 - 2r1r2 + r2^2, which is symmetric, which means we can write it as a function of the coefficients. So we've come up with an expression whose square root depends on the way we've labeled the roots (using Vieta's formulas you can show it's b^2-4c, which you might recognize from the quadratic equation).
Galois theory is used to show that root extraction can only break certain types of symmetries, and that fifth degree polynomials can exhibit root symmetries that are not breakable by radicals.
The Greeks "notation" was a diagram full of points labeled by letters (Α, Β, Γ, ...) with various lines connecting them and a list of steps to do with an unmarked ruler and a compass, some of which added new points. But those tools alone can't be used to describe cube roots of arbitrary numbers (or, equivalently, trisections of arbitrary angles).
> What is this [statisticians' function]?
The integral of the bell curve (normal distribution) is called its cumulative distribution function (CDF). The CDF of the normal distribution is closely related to a special function called the "error function" erf(x).
> Is there a good intro to [the symmetry interpretation of the quadratic formula]?
> However, I have questions: "Turns out the quantity they needed exists, but couldn't be described in their notation" What is this about? Sounds interesting.
There are hierarchies of numbers (quantities) in mathematics, just as there are hierarchies of patterns (formal languages) in computer science, based on how difficult these objects are to describe. The most widely accepted hierarchy is actually the same in math and CS: rational, algebraic, transcendental.
In math, a rational number is one that can be described by dividing two integers. In CS, a rational pattern is one that can be described by a regular expression (regex). This is still "division": Even when we can't do 1-x or 1/x, we can recognize the pattern 1/(1-x) = 1 + x + x^2 + x^3... as "zero or more occurrences of x", written in a regex as x*.
In math, an algebraic number is one can be found as a root of a polynomial with integer coefficients. The square root of 2 is the poster child, solving x^2 - 2 = 0, and "baby's first proof" in mathematics is showing that this is not a fraction of two integers.
In CS, an algebraic pattern is one that can be described using a stack machine. Correctly nested parentheses (()(())) is the poster child here; we throw plates on a stack to keep track of how deep we are. The grammars of most programming languages are algebraic: If the square root of math is like nested parentheses, then roots of higher degree polynomials are like more complicated nested expressions such as "if then else" statements. One needs lots of colors of plates, but same idea.
In math, everything else (e, Pi, ...) is called trancendental. CS has more grades of eggs, but same idea.
One way to organize this is to take a number x and look at all expressions combining powers of x. If x^3 = 2, or more generally if x is the root of any polynomial, then the list of powers wraps around on itself, and one is looking at a finite dimensional space of expressions. If x is transcendental, then the space of expressions is infinite.
So where were the Greeks in all this? Figuring out where two lines meet is linear algebra, but figuring out where a line meets a circle uses the quadratic formula, square roots. It turns out that their methods could reach some but not all algebraic numbers. They knew how to repeatedly double the dimension of the space of expressions they were looking at, but for example they couldn't triple this space. The cube root of 2 is one of the simplest numbers beyond their reach. And "squaring the circle" ? Yup, Pi is transcendental. Way out of their reach.
When you have a hammer you see nails. When you have a circle you see doubling.
What is so unbelievably frustrating about math education is that these interesting questions are not even hinted at until far, far down the line (and before people make the assumption I was educated outside the US).
I avoided math like the plague until my PhD program. Real analysis was a program requirement so I had to quickly teach myself calculus and get up to speed—and I found I really, really liked it. These high level questions are just so interesting and beyond the rote calculation I thought math was.
I hope I can give my daughter a glimpse of the interesting parts before the school system manages to kill her interest altogether (and I would welcome tips to that end if anyone has them).
Geometric proofs are really accessible. You don't need any algebra to prove Pythagoras' theorem, or that the sum of the inner angles of a triangle is 180 degrees, for example. Compass and straight-edge construction of simple figures is also fun.
Oh! RDB was the first database I worked with. I forgot all about it. I do remember refactoring the data layer so that it also worked with Berkeley DB, which is also owned by Oracle now. Or maybe it was the other way around? There was no SQL involved in that particular application so it was just a K/V store. Working with a local data file was the primary design goal, no client/server stuff was even on the radar. SQLite would have been perfect if it had existed.
Wow, I spent many hours on those Battletech Muds. It did have a cool realtime battle system but the faction vs faction wars never happened as far as I remember. There were several offshoots, including some that did 24/7 "live" battles that focused on one planet which was much more scalable. Organizing a scouting expedition was pretty fun. There was a Solaris world too. I ran the Kurita mechwarrior school for a while, doing new pilot training, and I was one of the people who could log in to the TK faction leader account. But then I graduated and got a job haha.
oh hey I probably remember you as I do kind of remember knowing that the head trainer was TK!
I multi-factioned for a while (shame shame!) and had a low level character in the DC. The way you all did mechwarrior training was so much more hardcore than all the other IS factions (never played as clan). It was also the one major faction where I never even came close to getting a character into their SpecOps unit(s), not sure if you all realized how much better you were than everyone else skill-wise lol.
Eventually I wound up in charge of Marik and that ended all the time I had for multi-factioning.
Yeah, this was a google interview question for me too. I didn't know the algorithm and floundered around trying to solve the problem. I came up with the 1/n and k/n selection strategy but still didn't get the job lol. I think the guy who interviewed me was just killing time until lunch.
I like the visualizations in this article, really good explanation.
I didn't know about the algorithm until after I got hired there. It's actually really useful in a number of contexts, but my favorite was using it to find optimal split points for sharding lexicographically sorted string keys for mapping. Often you will have a sorted table, but the underlying distribution of keys isn't known, so uniform sharding will often cause imbalances where some mappers end up doing far more work than others. I don't know if there is a convenient open source class to do this.
Interesting idea, hadn’t that about that way to apply it.
I knew it from before my interview from a turbo pascal program I had seen that sampled dat tape backups of patient records from a hospital system. These samples were used for studies. That was a textbook example of it’s utility.
I guess the question in my mind is: would you expect a smart person who did not previously know this problem (or really much random sampling at all) to come up with the algorithm on the fly in an interview? And if the person had seen it before and memorized the answer, does that provide any signal of their ability to code?
My gut instinct is no. I certainly don't think I'd be able to derive this algorithm from first principles in a 60 minute whiteboarding interview, and I worked at Google for 4 years.
They wanted to see your analytical thinking skills at work. To pass you only needed to be sensible. You didn’t fail the interview if you couldn’t invent reservoir sampling!
2025 RSA Conference USA in San Francisco. So lots of papers are going to be presented and talks given on new clever ways researchers have figured out to beat different layers of security, tracking APT's, etc.
I hope you're entirely kidding with that statement.
RSA was famously bribed by the NSA to make their compromised PRNG the default in their cryptography library, which shipped from 2004 to 2013. Any credibility they might've had vanished after that was publicized in the Snowden leaks.
Didn't find any good technical write-ups. Although apparently it's "patented".
Here's a decent video overview. I hate that everything is video now but this is the world we live in I suppose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fh5qc-ZnaM
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